The Russians Withdraw

Eight months of work by the State Department was exploded in a couple of minutes last week. The Russians suddenly withdrew from the International Aviation Conference, which opened in Chicago this week.

For months frail, nervous Assistant Secretary Adolph A. Berle Jr. had worked. He had flown to Britain to get its views, had talked with the Russians, Chinese, and small nations, blocking out the big problem: how should postwar international airlines be allotted and regulated? He had also taken meticulous care of the small problems. In Chicago's Stevens Hotel, 600 rooms were set aside for the delegates from over 50 nations, chefs planned foreign dishes for the menu, three telephone lines had been installed direct from the hotel to the State Department.

Russia's withdrawal from the conference was announced just three days before it opened. Russia's stated reason: "Countries like Switzerland, Portugal and Spain, which for many years have conducted a profascist policy hostile to the Soviet Union, have also been invited."

The State Department seemed stunned. Though it had bickered with the British, it had apparently gotten along swimmingly with the Russians on air affairs. While it frantically worked to heal the break, the Department hugged the bad news to itself for two days--and confirmed the news only after Moscow radio announced it.

Real Reason? Russia had known for six weeks who was going to attend the conference, had even appointed her own delegation, headed by the Russian Ambassador to the U.S., Andrei A. Gromyko.

What were Russia's real reasons? Best guesses: Russia has not been enthusiastic over "freedom of transit, i.e., the right of planes of any nation to fly over the territory of another and land to refuel, a doctrine which both the U.S. and Britain favor. More important, Russia was opposed, as is the U.S., to the British plan for an all-powerful international air commission. The British want such a commission to control international civil aviation by doling out routes, setting fares, eliminating "uneconomic competition," etc. Russia did not want to go along with these views even temporarily.

The withdrawal was a slap at the U.S. as well as at Britain, because the State Department had confidently counted on Russia to help get rid of the plan. Now the question of an all-powerful air authority was dead--for the time.

An Air Policy. Despite this shattering news, the State Department plodded ahead. The President appointed a U.S. delegation of some 36 air experts, technicians and aids, including Civil Aeronautics Board Chairman Lloyd Welch Pogue and a handful of politicos, including New York's Mayor LaGuardia. Assistant Secretary Berle was named chairman. The delegates were supplied with maps and the beginnings of a U.S. air policy, which boiled down to two U.S. wants: 1) 140,000 miles of global air routes under the freest of competition; 2) an international air authority, with only limited powers (safety measures, etc.), a sort of international Civil Aeronautics Administration.

What could the conference accomplish now? Optimists hoped that perhaps at least provisional air routes, to be flown by private lines as soon as the war permits, could be mapped and allotted, and technical matters of standard controls for traffic worked out. But settlement of the big problems still waited on Russia.

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